In Virginia, you can teach anyone anything—except how to earn an honest living. That’s the lesson Jon and Tracy McGlothian learned when they tried to open a school to teach job skills to adults in their Virginia Beach community. Yet the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia (SCHEV) has made it virtually impossible for them to do so legally.
SCHEV says that Jon and Tracy can’t teach skills like project management or sewing without its permission; permission the council has refused to grant for more than two years. That’s why Jon and Tracy have teamed up with the Institute for Justice (IJ) to file a federal lawsuit against SCHEV to vindicate their right to teach for a living.
Jon and Tracy worked for a lifetime to build skills to become, respectively, a certified project management professional (PMP) and experienced sewer. In 2015, their established business, the Mt. Olivet Group, LLC (TMOG), set out to teach people the skills they would need to advance in these fields. Under Virginia law, they could freely teach anyone these skills as a hobby, but cannot teach the general public if students want to use their classes to earn an honest living.
“What SCHEV is doing violates the First Amendment,” said Paul Sherman, a senior attorney with IJ. “Teaching is speech, and the government has no business telling Jon and Tracy they’re not allowed to teach willing adults. Under the First Amendment, people get to decide for themselves which speakers are worth learning from; the government doesn’t get to decide that for them.”
